The purpose of the Internet, in terms of business, is to match consumers with products. The Internet has created an easy to access worldwide market. This market has invited many different types of merchants trying to connect with their particular consumers. However, the size and attractiveness of the market has created a very crowded cyberspace. This crowdedness has created the need for merchants to advertise or find other ways to match their product with consumers. Specialty websites, such as Amazon®, fulfill the need. Merchants will contract with these sites to either collect orders, obtain information or direct traffic to their sites. These specialty sites will have relationships with multiple merchants, and each merchant will have their own particular needs. Therefore, there is a need for an efficient system to build individualized pages for multiple merchants, manage inventory and determine the order in which those pages are displayed to the end user.
In the business of online marketing, it is necessary to efficiently create individualized web pages and to track performance of marketing campaigns with very “broken down” data to maximize business profits. There are very few tracking software applications designed for web-based business lead generation and information gathering, and the ones that are available do not meet the requirements of today's industry.
Currently, no software or system is available that allows a user to create and manage multiple offers; edit, manage, project inventory; and/or prioritize the displaying of these offers based upon several factors such as business need, income, conversion and inventory. The current packages available do not meet the needs of today's business. The main function of these packages is to handle reporting and tracking. Basically they count clicks and leads for websites. These programs have a “pixel-based” structure, meaning that one would place an invisible line of code (a pixel) on each of their web pages on ones site. Each time the page would load, the pixel would fire. This is how counts of clicks and leads occur in the current software available. There is no concept of inventory or offer priority in the available systems.